An insider’s view of a job lost of federal managers grit their teeth at and tolerate

Inspectors General have a long history dating to their pivotal role in the American revolution. Like their forebears, modern IG’s must deal with politics, personalities, and the fact that government often performs poorly. It’s all detailed in a book Watchdogs by former federal IG Glenn Fine, who joins the Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin And this book, what would you call it? There’s a few scores settled, but there’s also a bit of historical nonfiction, plus some really great anecdotes. How would you describe the book?

Glenn Fine I wanted to write a book to describe the critical role of inspectors general. They have been called some of the most important public servants you’ve never heard of. I wanted to expose people to the critical check and balance they play in our government, and I believe they’re a pillar of our democracy. So I do talk about my time as the inspector general of the Department of Justice for 11 years, and as the acting inspector general of the Department of Defense. Go through some of the investigations and the impact that they have, the history of IGs, as well as reforms to the IG system to make them even more effective.

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Tom Temin All right. Well that sounds like a good polished answer. First of all, the tensions in the job. IGs have to interact and cooperate to some degree, I’m thinking with the Government Accountability Office, Office of Special Counsel. As you say, it’s a job with a lot of balancing in human relations involved too, isn’t it?

Glenn Fine Absolutely. IGs are not the only oversight entity in government, and we need to coordinate with the others, Government Accountability Office, as you said. Congress, which does oversight the courts, nonprofit groups. And it is a challenging role. You also have to keep the agency head fully informed of problems, as well as the Congress. So that has been likened sometimes to straddling a barbed wire fence. It’s a dual reporting requirement, and you have to be transparent and effective in communicating with all these other entities that have a similar role to IG’s, but not the same role.

Tom Temin Right. Did you ever bump in to, GAO and say, no, we’re doing that. And they say no, we’re investigating it.

Glenn Fine All the time. GAO, An arm of Congress would do investigations at the request of Congress. Sometimes we were doing similar investigations, so we tried to coordinate with them. We did not want to duplicate their efforts or overlap with them because that would create a burden on the agency. And we did have a good relationship with GAO. They would try to deconflict the things they were doing with what we were doing. It wasn’t always possible at all times, because sometimes they were required to do it by Congress. But it was a good relationship. They have a very good head of the GAO, Gene Dodaro, who made it a point to try and coordinate and interact well with IGs. And he did.

Tom Temin All right. And you got into this in the time before the Internet, and you were an attorney and came into government as an IG at the Justice Department. And there’s a great anecdote about number 1044, which says a lot about the confirmation process at that time.

Glenn Fine So I was nominated to be the inspector general by President Clinton in the year 2000. It was an election year, I got a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee voted out unanimously. I was told I might be confirmed when the Senate adjourned that year. The only problem was the Senate didn’t adjourn that year before the election. It was the election between Al Gore and George W. Bush. After the election came the contest period. It was a contested election. That contest period went all the way up to the Supreme Court. Finally, the court determined no for the recount, and George W. Bush was going to be the president. I thought all the nominations would die and therefore I would have to start thinking about my next chapter, another job.

Glenn Fine But the last day of the Senate session, as I was packing to go home, I get a call from the official in the Office of Legislative Affairs and the Department Justice. And she said, Glenn, I heard there might be some confirmations of non-controversial candidates today, and you might be one of them. I said, Really? And she said, yes. I said, Well, how do I find out if I have been confirmed? This was before constant C-Span coverage in the Internet, as you said. So she said, well, you’re the 1,044th presidential nominee this year. Your number 1044. Call this number, the clerk of the Senate, when you get home and ask what happened to 1044? I said, Really? Is that really the way you find out if you’ve been confirmed by the United States Senate? And she said, yep, that’s the best way now. So I went home, told my wife about it. She was very excited. She said, Well, call. So I did. I called a number and somebody picked up the phone and barked out, Hello? And I said, Excuse me, could you tell me what happened to 1044? And he said, Hold on a second. And he put me on hold. I was on hold for ten minutes, gets back on the line, he says, What do you want again? I said, Could you please tell me what happened to nominee 1044? And he said, All right. And you could hear paper shuffling. Then he gets back on line and says, By the way, are you 1044? I said, Yes, I am. And he said, Well, congratulations, Mr. Fine. You’ve been confirmed to be the Department of Justice inspector general by the United States Senate, Merry Christmas. Click. And he hung up the phone. So that’s how I found out I was confirmed to be the inspector general of the Department of Justice. A very august position.

Tom Temin Yes, we’re speaking with Glenn Fine. He is the former justice inspector general and also former acting defense IG. And you had a lot to do at the Justice Department. FBI laboratory. That was a really interesting story in the book. And I can remember when that came to light of some of the mishandling, and just poor management of the FBI’s crucial laboratory. Tell us some of the highlights of that investigation.

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Glenn Fine That investigation was conducted under the auspices of my predecessor, Michael Bromwich, a terrific IG. I came to the IG’s office, one of the first things I did was interview one of the whistleblowers, an analyst in the laboratory who had complained of faulty scientific practices. We thought he was credible. Michael Bromwich opened a full investigation of the laboratory practices, hired several renowned scientists and assistant United States attorneys to look over the practices and found very significant faulty practices. Lack of documentation, inaccurate testimony, contamination, all sorts of problems that called into question the very important results of the laboratory in some of the most high profile cases of the time, including the O.J. Simpson case, the Oklahoma City bombing case. And under the under Michael Bromwich as auspices, the team issued a report that made significant recommendations for improvement to the laboratory, including that it seek accreditation. As a result of this report and the recommendations, the laboratory did so. They changed its practices, and ultimately, did get accreditation and also hired an outside scientist to lead the laboratory. So that was one example of the tremendous impact that IGs can have through their reports by looking at them objectively, credibly and not pulling any punches. And that was an example of it.

Tom Temin And seeing some of these investigations. You hadn’t been born yesterday, so to speak, when entering the Justice Department, but were you surprised at the scope and complexity of federal programs and operations, and also the degree to which they can really get off the rails?

Glenn Fine Well, the Department of Justice is a huge operation. It’s not just lawyers, as many people believe. Yes, it is lawyers in main justice and the U.S. attorney’s office, this includes the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the United States Marshals Service, Bureau of Prisons. And an operation that complex and that size there are going to be problems. That’s why you need aggressive, independent oversight to audit, evaluate and investigate the full range of operations throughout the entire Department of Justice. And that’s what we tried to do.

Tom Temin And the Bureau of Prisons, I think, was vexing them. It’s vexing the current IG, Michael Horowitz. It seems to defy efforts at reform. But you did an investigation which shows that sometimes life can be in danger.

Glenn Fine Yes, we have law enforcement agents in the IG’s office who investigate corruption in the Bureau of Prisons, including sexual abuse of inmates, introduction of contraband, physical abuse of inmates. And we had an investigation that did result in the loss of life. It was a investigation that our Florida office did of a prison in Tallahassee, where there was a ring of correctional officers who were abusing, sexually abusing female inmates and threatening them with retaliation. They came forward and reported it. Ultimately, they did. Our agents work along with the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office indicted five corrupt correctional officers. When we went to arrest them, we decided it would be safest to do it in the prison. So we tried to arrest them when they were on duty. The first arrest of the first guard was done without incident. When our agents tried to arrest, the second guard, came out from behind the reception desk, pulled out a gun from his gym bag, and guns weren’t supposed to be allowed in the prison, but he pulled out a gun and started firing. He shot a lieutenant, bureau prisoners lieutenant, and then he shot one of our agents who was stationed at the door. Our agents felt that our agent fell down, and before the correctional officer could shoot anybody else, he leaned back up, returned fire, shot the correctional officer. And then our agent leaned back down and died. He was a true hero. I talk about him in the book, his name is Buddy Sentner. And Law Enforcement agents in the IG’s office and throughout the federal law enforcement community put their lives on the line in dangerous situations to protect. And in my view, they are true heroes, as was Buddy Sentner.

Tom Temin My guest is Glenn Fine, former justice inspector general and acting defense IG and the author of Watchdogs from the University of Virginia Press. And you left government, and then came back as the acting defense IG. Correct?

Glenn Fine Correct. I was the inspector general of the Department Justice for 11 years from 2000 to 2011. After that period of time, I thought change was good. Both for me and also for the organization. I stepped down, landed a job at a big international law firm, Dechert, and did that for a few years. But then I guess I am a recidivist, because it did not have the same satisfaction for me and I wanted to get back into public service, and I took a job first as the principal deputy inspector general, the Department of Defense IG’s office. And then when the IG himself announced his retirement a few months later, I became the acting IG in 2016, where I remained for over four and a half years until 2020.

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Tom Temin The Pentagon itself is large and complex, almost beyond anyone’s single ability to understand it all. And the IG’s office there is the size of a mid-sized corporation. How did you go about figuring out where to begin, how to set priorities on something so vast when there’s probably 100 things a day that could come in that are worth investigating?

Glenn Fine Well, you’re right. The Department of Defense is the largest organization in terms of employees of any kind in the world. It has over 3 million employees. It has an $800 billion budget to oversee all of that. And the IG’s office does oversee all of it. We had 1800 employees. That’s not enough given the size of the Department of Defense. I do not have a military background. I did know how to be an IG. I was an IG, and I think being an IG in any agency is similar. But I had to learn about the Department of Defense and the vast size of it. So I had tremendous staff, talented staff. Some of them are former military, I had military aides. And I relied on the dedicated staff to determine where the most profitable and most urgent areas were to review and audit. And that’s what we tried to do. I also met with the leaders of the department, with the heads of the military services, the top generals and admirals, to learn what was important to them and what their priorities are, and also what they thought would benefit from an IG review. Finally, we used a document that we wrote called the Top Management and Performance Challenges in the Department. All IGs have to do that and we assessed what were the key risk factors in the department and tried to make sure that we covered those risk factors in all the top areas where there were management challenges.

Tom Temin And you also had an early lesson in Defense Department etiquette with respect of how people address one another.

Glenn Fine Yes. When I came, I would ask people would call me Mr. Fine or sir. And I said, You can call me Glenn. I’d say half of our staff are former military, and they were very reluctant to do that. They had been trained to call officers and head leaders of their organization, sir, not use their first name. And in fact, even when I would walk into the room, they would stand up and I would tell them, you don’t have to do that. And they said, Sir, that’s how we show respect for the office. So eventually I decided to go along with the culture rather than change it. And it is a very impressive culture that they have there.

Tom Temin And I think one of the cases that still astounds me and it’s not quite over yet, I don’t think, and that is the Fat Leonard case, which in a sense had the potential to sink the Navy, so to speak.

Glenn Fine Yes, It was the worst corruption scandal in Navy history. Fat Leonard, Glenn Leonard Francis ran a ship servicing company in Asia, and he service the ships in ports, gave them tugboat services, food, water, sewage treatment issues. But the way he did it was by corrupting Navy officers with small gifts and then big gifts, tickets, dinners, then cash, then bribes, then prostitutes. And in return, he demanded that they change their ship schedules to come into his ports, to give them information about his competitors bids, and also to overlook the tremendous overcharging he was doing of the Navy. He was like an intelligence agent. He knew what your weakness was and he would try and corrupt you through that. And he corrupted many officers in the Seventh Fleet. Ultimately, he was discovered and our office, Defense Criminal Investigative Service, along with the Navy Criminal Investigative Service and U.S. Attorney’s office, arrested him and some of his colleagues, as well as many Navy officers. It was a stain on the Navy. It was the worst corruption scandal, Navy history. But ultimately, many of them were brought to justice. So it was a challenging time for the Navy. So many officers were involved with this.

Tom Temin We’re speaking with Glenn Fine, former justice inspector general and acting defense IG. Author of Watchdogs from the University of Virginia Press. Did you come away feeling that the Navy is fundamentally sound in its procurement and practices of spending money because so many people involved in such a crucial operation, like the Seventh Fleet?

Glenn Fine It was a problem, but ultimately it was discovered and it was not swept under the rug. So I do think that the Navy and the military in general, when it has problems, tries to fix those problems. It’s a human organization. And there will be individuals who stray. One of the things we tried to do, I tried to do as an IG was to speak to all one-star new admirals and generals, and talk about ethics issues and the importance of the ethics and the importance of stressing that and the importance of staying in the ethical midfield. That was Secretary Mattis’ advice, don’t stray too close to the line because you may stay over the line. And I also remember a quote from General Dunford, who was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff that resonated with us and with others. He said he learned as a new lieutenant that every time you see something that is below standard and ignore it, you have created a new standard and it’s lower. So I think the military needs to ensure that it has high standards. It does, but when it has problems, they have an IG and others to correct it. That’s one of the strengths of the system.

Tom Temin And in the latter day of your tenure and also of our times, there was the pandemic response, trillions appropriated with the earlier relief from the 2008 financial response, all the apparatus for detecting fraud and keeping things honest had sunsetted. So the PRAC came in with kind of bare handed. Try to understand all of this. What’s your final assessment there?

Glenn Fine So you’re right. When COVID hit the government appropriate trillions of dollars in relief set up a committee of IGs called the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee to oversee that money. It had to be built from scratch because the recovery board, which had been started in response to the Recovery Act in 2009, had lapsed, and the Recovery Board had great tools and they had done a very good job, but unfortunately it did not remain. So the PRAC had to go start from scratch. I was appointed to be the chair of PRAC. I drew the short straw for my fellow IGs who selected me. And within five days I was replaced by President Trump as the acting IG of the Department of Defense, and therefore could not be on the PRAC and my tenure was over. So from afar, I’ve seen it,  it’s work. I think it has done a good job in building its tools. Michael Horowitz is the chair of it. Paul Martin is the vice chair.  And other IGs have worked diligently on it, and I think they’ve done a good job. But unfortunately the money had gone out the door by the time they created the PRAC. And that’s a problem. It’s much harder to get the money back when it’s subject to fraud, than to put in internal controls and prevent it from going out the door for fraudulent purposes. So my one of the recommendations in my book is the PRAC ought to be made permanent. The tools of the PRAC from the analytical tools of the PRAC so that when the next emergency and on an ongoing basis, it can detect and deter fraud before it occurs.

Tom Temin And from a personal standpoint, your father was 28 years in the Justice Department, correct? As an attorney?

Glenn Fine Yes, he was. He was a lawyer. He took a job with the antitrust division in Philadelphia. And he worked for 28 years for the Justice Department before he retired. So I sometimes joke when I joined the Justice Department, I went into the family business.

Tom Temin And was he around to see you become inspector general?

Glenn Fine No, he was not, unfortunately.

Tom Temin  All right. But sounds like maybe he’s kind of looking over your shoulder in some manner after all.

Glenn Fine I hope so. I think he would have been proud that I worked for the government trying to make it a better place.

Tom Temin  And you did get involved, your removal in the controversy that seemed to be devil the Trump administration at every turn. And having been an IG for, I guess, a total of 15, 16 years in the two stints. Do you come away feeling that government is fundamentally honest in the United States? And is it fundamentally competent?

Glenn Fine Yes, I think so. I have enormous respect for the many, many dedicated and talented public servants who make our government work, who provide security services to our citizens. It’s not perfect. In any organization there will be inefficiencies, and there will be people who are not suited for the job. But by and large, they are unsung heroes. I think in the federal government who are making our country better. And by the way, I would be visited by foreign officials from other countries who would want to understand our model of oversight. And they marveled at our system. They marveled at the fact that we had IGs in every federal agencies who had statutory authority, who had jurisdiction, who had the resources to detect and deter problems and report on them to make transparent what was happening. So I think it is a strength of our system, and strength of our democracy, particularly compared with other countries that don’t have this important oversight role. So, yes, there are problems. There will always be problems. But one of the strengths of our democracy is that we seek to fix it.

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